The Woman Who Toils Part 9

Is their fundamental thought to be of benefit to a family or to some member of a family? Is their indirect object to be strong, thrifty members of society? No. Their parents are secondary, their health is secondary to the consuming vanity that drives them toward a ruinous goal. They scorn the hand-workers; they feel themselves a _n.o.blesse_ by comparison. They are the American sn.o.bs whose coat of arms marks not a well-remembered family but prospective luxuries.... Married, they bring as a portion thriftless tastes, to satisfy which more than one business man has wrecked his career. They work like men; why should they not live as men do, with similar responsibilities? What should we think of a cla.s.s of masculine clerks and employees who spent all their money on clothes?

The boss was busy when I got back to the clothing establishment. From the bench where I waited for orders I could take an inventory of the shop's productions. Arrayed in rows behind gla.s.s cases there were all manner of uniforms: serious uniforms going to the colonies to be shot to pieces, militia uniforms that would hear their loudest heart-beats under a fair head; drum-majors' hats that would never get farther than the peaceful lawn of a military post; fireman's hats; the dark-blue coat of a lonely lighthouse guardian; the undignified short jacket of a "b.u.t.tons." All that meant parade and glory, the uniforms that make men identical by making each proud of himself for his bra.s.s b.u.t.tons and gold lace. Even in the heavy atmosphere of the shop's rear, though they appeared somewhat dingy and tarnished, they had their undeniable charm, and I thought with pity of the hands that had to sew on plain serge suits.

[Ill.u.s.tration: IN A CHICAGO THEATRICAL COSTUME FACTORY]

As soon as the boss saw me, the generous Mr. F. who advanced me the fifty cents smiled at the skeptical Mr. F. who had never expected to see me again. One self said to the other: "I told you so!" and all the kindly lines in the man's face showed that he had looked for the best even in his inferiors and that he had found mankind worth trusting. He was the most generous employer I met with anywhere; I also took him to be the least businesslike. But, as though quickly to establish the law of averages, his head forewoman counterbalanced all his mercies by her ferocious crossness. She terrorized everybody, even Mr. F. It was to her, I concluded, that we owed our $6 a week. No girl would stay for less; it was an atelier chiefly of foreign employees; the proud American spirit would not stand the lash of Frances' tongue. She had been ten years in the place whose mad confusion was order to her. Mr. F. did not dare to send her away; he preferred keeping a perpetual advertis.e.m.e.nt in the papers and changing hands every few days.

The workroom on our floor was fifty or sixty feet long, with windows on the street at one end and on a court at the other. The middle of the room was lighted by gas. The air was foul and the dirt lay in heaps at every corner and was piled up under the centre tables. It was less like a workshop than an old attic. There was the long-acc.u.mulated disorder of hasty preparation for the vanities of life. It had not at all the aspect of a factory which makes a steady provision of practical things. There were odds and ends of fancy costumes hanging about--swords, crowns, belts and badges. Under the sewing machines' swift needles flew the scarlet coats of a regiment; gold and silver braid lay unfurled on the table; the hand-workers bent over an armful of khaki; a row of young girls were fitting military caps to imaginary soldier's heads; the ensigns of glory slipped through the fingers of the humble; chevrons and epaulets were caressed never so closely by toil-worn hands. In the midst of us sits a man on a headless hobby horse, making small gray trunks bound in red leather, such boxes as might contain jewels for Marguerite, a game of lotto, or a collection of jack-straws and mother-of-pearl counters brought home from a first trip abroad. The trunk maker wears a sombrero and smokes a corn-cob pipe. He is very handsome with dark eyes and fine features, and he has the "average figure," so that he serves as manikin for the atelier; and I find him alternately a workman in overalls and a Turkish magnate with turban and flowing robes. It is into this atmosphere of toil and unreality that I am initiated as a hand sewer. Something of the dramatic and theatrical possesses the very managers themselves. Below, a regiment waits impatient for new bra.s.s b.u.t.tons; we sew against time and break all our promises. Messengers arrive every few minutes with fresh reports of rising ire on the part of disappointed customers. Down the stairs pell-mell comes an elderly partner of the firm with a gold-and-purple crown on his head and after him follows the kindly Mr. F. in an usher's jacket. "If you don't start now," he calls, "that order'll be left on our hands."

Amid such confusion the regular rhythm of the needle as it carries its train of thread across the yards of coloured cloth is peaceful, consoling. I have on one side of me a tailor who speaks only Polish, on the other side a seamstress who speaks only German. Across the frontier I thus become they communicate with signs, and I get my share of work planned out by each. Every woman in the place is cross except the girl next to me. She has only just come in and the poison of the forewoman has not yet stung her into ill nature. She is, like all the foreigners, neatly, soberly dressed in a sensible frock of good durable material.

The few Americans in the shop have on elaborate s.h.i.+rt-waists in light-coloured silks with fancy ribbon collars. We are well paid, there is no doubt of it. We begin work at 8 A.M. and have a generous half-hour at noon. Most of the girls are Germans and Poles, and they have all received training as tailoresses in their native countries. To the sharp onslaught of Frances' tongue they make no response except in dogged silent obedience, whereas the dressy Americans with their proper spirit of independence touch the limit of insubordination at every new command.

Insults are freely exchanged; threats ring out on the tired ears.

Frances is ubiquitous. She scolds the tailors with a torrent of abuse, she terrorizes the handsome manikin, she bewilders the kindly Mr. F., and before three days have pa.s.sed she has dismissed the neat little Polish girl, in tears. This latter comes to me, her face wrought with emotion. She was receiving nine dollars a week; it is her first place in America. This sudden dismissal, its injustice, requires an explanation.

She cannot speak a word of English and asks me to put my poor German at her service as interpreter.

Mr. F. is clearly a man who advocates everything for peace, and as there is for him no peace when Frances is not satisfied, we gain little by our appeal to him except a promise that he will attend later to the troubles of the Polish girl. But later, as earlier, Frances triumphs, and I soon bid good-by to my seatmate and watch her tear-stained face disappear down the dingy hallway. She was a skilled tailoress, but she could not cut out men's garments, so Frances dismissed her. I wonder when my turn will come, for I am a green hand and yet determined to keep the American spirit. For the sake of justice I will not be downed by Frances.

It is hard to make friends with the girls; we dare not converse lest a fresh insult be hurled at us. For every mistake I receive a loud, severe correction. When night comes I am exhausted. The work is easy, yet the moral atmosphere is more wearing than the noise of many machines. My job is often changed during the week. I do everything as a greenhorn, but I work hard and pay attention, so that there is no excuse to dismiss me.

"I am only staying here between jobs," the girl next me volunteers at lunch. "My regular place burnt out. You couldn't get _me_ to work under _her_. I wouldn't stand it even if they do pay well." She is an American.

"You're lucky to be so independent," says a German woman whose dull silence I had hitherto taken for ill nature. "I'm glad enough to get the money. I was up this morning at five, working. There's myself and my mother and my little girl, and not a cent but what I make. My husband is sick. He's in Arizona."

"What were you doing at five?" I asked.

"I have a trade," she answers. "I work on hair goods. It don't bring me much, but I get in a few hours night and morning and it helps some.

There's so much to pay."

She was young, but youth is no lover of discomfort. Hards.h.i.+ps had chased every vestige of _jeunesse_ from her high, wrinkled brow and tired brown eyes. Like a mirror held against despair her face reflected no ray of hope. She was not rebellious, but all she knew of life was written there in lines whose sadness a smile now and again intensified.

Added to the stale, heavy atmosphere there is now a smell of coffee and tobacco smoke. The old hands have boiled a noon beverage on the gas; the tailors smoke an after-dinner pipe. Put up in newspaper by Mrs. Wood, at my matinal departure, my lunches, after a journey across the city, held tightly under my arm, become, before eating, a block of food, a composite meal in which I can distinguish original bits of ham sandwich and apple pie. The work, however, does not seem hard to me. I sew on b.u.t.tons, rip trousers, baste coat sleeves--I do all sorts of odd jobs from eight until six, without feeling, in spite of the bad air, any great physical fatigue which ten minutes' brisk walk does not shake off.

But never have the hours dragged so; the moral weariness in the midst of continual scolding and abuse are unbearable. Each night I come to a firm decision to leave the following day, but weakly I return, sure of my dollar and dreading to face again the giant city in search of work.

About four one afternoon, well on in the week, Frances brings me a pair of military trousers; the stripes of cloth at the side seam are to be ripped off. I go to work cheerfully cutting the threads and slipping one piece of cloth from the other.

Apparently Frances is exasperated that I should do the job in an easy way. It is the only way I know to rip, but Frances knows another way that breaks your back and almost puts your eyes out, that makes you tired and behindhand and sure of a scolding. She shows me how to rip her way. The two threads of the machine, one from above and one from below, which make the st.i.tch, must be separated. The work must be turned first on the wrong, then on the right side, the scissors must lift first the upper, then the under thread. I begin by cutting a long hole in the trousers, which I hide so Frances will not see it. She has frightened me into dishonesty. Arrived at the middle of the stripe I am obliged to turn the trousers wrong side out and right side out again every other st.i.tch. While I was working in this way, getting more enraged every moment, a bedbug ran out of the seam between my fingers. I killed it. It was full of blood and made a wet red spot on the table. Then I put down the trousers and drew away my chair. It was useless saying anything to the girl next me. She was a Pole, dull, sullen, without a friendly word; but the two women beyond had told me once that they pitied Frances'

husband, so I looked to them for support in what I was about to do.

"There's bedbugs in them clothes," I said. "I won't work on 'em. No, sir, not if she sends me away this very minute."

In a great hurry Frances pa.s.sed me twice. She called out angrily both times without waiting for an answer:

"Why don't you finish them pants?"

Frances was a German. She wore two rhinestone combs in her frizzes, which held also dust and burnt odds and ends of hair. She had no lips whatever. Her mouth shut completely over them after each tirade. Her eyes were separated by two deep scowls and her voice was shrill and nasal.

On her third round she faced me with the same question:

"Why don't you finish them pants?"

"Because," I answered this time, "there's bedbugs in 'em and I ain't goin' to touch 'em!"

"Oh! my!" she taunted me, in a sneering voice, "that's dreadful, ain't it? Bedbugs! Why, you need only just look on the floor to see 'em running around anywhere!"

I said nothing more, and this remark was the last Frances ever addressed to me.

"Mike!" she called to the presser in the corner, "will you have this _young lady's_ card made out."

She gave me no further work to do, but, too humiliated to sit idle, I joined a group of girls who were sewing badges.

We had made up all description of political badges--badges for the court, for processions, school badges, military badges, flimsy bits of coloured ribbon and gold fringe which go the tour of the world, rallying men to glory. In the dismal twilight our fingers were now busied with black-and-silver "in memoriam" badges, to be worn as a last tribute to some dead member of a coterie who would follow him to the grave under the emblem that had united them.

We were behindhand for the dead as well as for the living. At six the power was turned off, the machine hands went home, there was still an unfinished heap of black badges.

I got up and put on my things in the dark closet that served for dressing-room. Frances called to the hand sewers in her rasping voice:

"You darsn't leave till you've finished them badges."

How could I feel the slavery they felt? My nerves were sensitive; I was unaccustomed to their familiar hards.h.i.+ps. But on the other hand, my prison had an escape; they were bound within four walls; I dared to rebel knowing the resources of the black silk emergency bag, money lined. They for their living must pay with moral submission as well as physical fatigue. There was nothing between them and starvation except the success of their daily effort. What opposition could the German woman place, what could she risk, knowing that two hungry mouths waited to be fed beside her own?

With a farewell glance at the rubbish-strewn room, the high, grimy windows, the group of hand sewers bent over their work in the increasing darkness, I started down the stairs. A hand was laid on my arm, and I looked up and saw Mike's broad Irish face and sandy head bending toward me.

"I suppose you understand," he said, "that there'll be no more work for you."

"Yes," I answered, "I understand," and we exchanged a glance that meant we both agreed it was Frances' fault.

In the shop below I found Mr. F. and returned the fifty cents he had advanced me. He seemed surprised at this.

"I'm sorry," he said, in his gentle voice, "that we couldn't arrange things."

"I'm sorry, too," I said. But I dared not add a word against Frances.

She had terrorized me like the rest, and though I knew I never would see her again, her pale, lifeless mask haunted me. I remembered a remark the German woman had made when Frances dismissed the Polish girl: "People ought to make it easy, and not hard, for others to earn a living."

At the end of this somewhat agitating day I returned to my tenement lodgings as to a haven of rest. There was one other lodger besides myself: she was studying music on borrowed money at four dollars a lesson. Obviously she was a victim to luxury in the same degree as the young women with whom I had lunched at the bakery. Nothing that a rich society girl might have had been left out of her wardrobe, and borrowed money seemed as good as any for making a splurge.

Miss Arnold was something of a sn.o.b, intellectual and otherwise. It was evident from my wretched clothes and poor grammar that I was not accustomed to ladies of her type, but, far from sparing me, she humiliated me with all sorts of questions.

"I'm tired of taffeta jackets, aren't you?" she would ask, apropos of my flimsy ulster. "I had taffeta last year, with velvet and satin this winter; but I don't know what I'll get yet this summer."

After supper, on my return, I found her sitting in the parlour with Mrs.

Brown. They never lighted the gas, as there was an electric lamp which sent its rays aslant the street and repeated the pattern of the window curtains all over Mrs. Brown's face and hands.

Drawn up on one end of the horsehair sofa, Miss Arnold, in a purple velvet blouse, chatted to Mrs. Brown and me.

"I'm from Jacksonville," she volunteered, patting her ma.s.ses of curly hair. "Do you know anybody from Jacksonville? It's an elegant town, so much wealth, so many retired farmers, and it's such an educational centre. Do you like reading?" she asked me.

"I don't get time," is my response.

"Oh, my!" she rattles on. "I'm crazy about reading. I do love blank verse--it makes the language so choice, like in Shakespeare."